I’ve been getting into the NFC groove lately and must admit I find it tremendously useful. When we picked up the Nokia Play bluetooth speaker it didn’t want to cooperate out of the box though. The (read-only) NFC inside it would report a string that only makes sense for Nokia mobiles and naturally left my Android phone scratching its head. There’s an easy fix though, just retag it.

I use the excellent Tasker app on my phones for automation, there’s a plugin for it called Locale NFC (made by a swedish dev too). Install it, add a new event -> plugin -> NFC, scan the 360 and reference a task. You’re done. It’ll automatically fix it. If you’re not using Tasker and/or want a free way then there’s an NFC retagger available in the Play Store. Unfortunately both ways won’t automatically perform any action on android since the tag is read-only, which means you can’t retag it to something unique for your phone which will prompt you to select an action for it every single time you scan it.

There’s a fix though, go to settings – apps – all apps – tags, and disable it. That way android’s native tag handler won’t be referenced and you won’t get the “Select an action” whenever you scan an NFC tag, instead the tag will simply execute as you specified. Incredibly handy to automatically have my phone turn on bluetooth, raise the volume to 90% and connect to the 360 whenever I swipe it over the speaker. Also begun using NFC tags for handshaking various password scenarios, saves time and leads to additional security since the keys aren’t stored on any of my computer networks any more. But I’ll leave those scenarios for another post.